10 Handy JavaScript Libraries and jQuery Plugins

JavaScript libraries can be the perfect solution for your web problems, and they should be in every web developer’s collection, unless you don’t care too much about cross-browser debugging. But despite being great resources, a JS library isn’t always the best option out there because a website shouldn’t rely too much on JavaScript to show or hide content. Some mobile devices won’t load it properly or can be an excessive load to other users. Now, you’ve got yourself a headache.

In today’s post, we’re going to share with you some useful JavaScript and jQuery libraries that could be the perfect solution for your current problems. Some of these might already be familiar to you, but you definitely don’t know all of them. That said, we hope this collection will help you find some tools and resources that will come in handy for your future projects.

Handlbars.js is a nice add-on to the Mustache templating language developed by GitHub co-founder and CEO, Chris Wanstrath. These logicless templating languages keep the view and the code separated, like we all expect them to be.

This JS library is used for manipulating documents based on data. It helps you bring data to life using HTML, CSS, and SVG. Its emphasis on web standards provides you with the full capabilities of modern browsers without relying on a proprietary framework. It combines visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

less is a CSS pre-processor that extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions, and many other techniques that let you make CSS that’s more maintainable, themable, and extensible. It runs inside Node, within the browser, and inside Rhino. There are also many other third-party tools that allow you to compile your files and watch for changes.

This JavaScript library is ideal for multi-touch gestures. It’s extremely efficient and lightweight (3KB gzipped) – no extras needed! What’s more it doesn’t require jQuery or other libraries to work. A jQuery plugin is also available.

Ember.js is a JS framework that will do all the heavy lifting for you. For routine tasks that are common to every web app, this framework will do those things for you, so you can focus on more important things, like building killer features and UI.

Sentry is a real-time event logging and aggregation platform that specializes in monitoring errors and getting all the information you need to do a proper post-mortem without the hassle that’s often associated with standard user feedback loop.

This JavaScript library works by detecting HTML5 and CSS3 features in your browser. It tests which native HTML5 and CSS3 features are available in the current UI and will show you the results in two ways: as properties on a global Modernizr object, and as classes on the <html> element. This allows you to progressively enhance your pages with a granular level of control over the experience.

Bower is a web-based package manager that offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of frontend package management, while at the same time exposing the package dependency model through an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. It doesn’t have system-wide dependencies, no dependencies shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

This web video player is built from the ground up for HTML5. It supports HTML5 and Flash videos, and even YouTube and Vimeo videos, through plugins. It also comes with support for video playback on desktops and mobile devices. Launched in 2010, the video player has now been used by more than 50,000 websites.